Charles Baudelaire

‘Into this atrocious book, I put all my heart…’ – Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire’s most famous work is his masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil (1857), which shocked the nineteenth-century French literary world with its outspoken descriptions of lesbian sex, drug taking, and prostitution, as well as depictions of lost innocence due to the corrupting and oppressive power of the modern city.

Baudelaire was criticized for linking sexuality and death in several of the poems, and charged with causing offence to public decency. Because it included erotic poems that celebrated the beauty and sensuality of his mixed-race mistress, Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil was instantly controversial upon publication, with six of its poems censored and removed on the grounds of being ‘an outrage to public morality’. The collection is now considered to be one of the masterpieces of French literature.

Baudelaire’s highly original collection influenced a whole generation of poets including Arthur Rimbaud, Stephane Mallarme, T. S. Eliot, among many others. Baudelaire is now considered one of the greatest French poets of all time, a writer of rich and subversive poems that revolutionized poetry.

‘Both deeply disturbing and deeply moving, a book that explores the dark side of human nature with brutal honesty.’ – Sylvia Plath
‘It was Baudelaire who created modern poetry…’ – T.S. Eliot

Book details:

Title: The Flowers of Evil
Author: Charles Baudelaire
Translator: R J Dent
ISBN: 978-1-257-63730-0
Language: English
Format: Paperback
Pages: 257
Publisher: Incunabula
Purchase link: https://incunabulamedia.com/r-j-dent-1